Buster McLeod

Stress scales

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:56:53 -0700

After some research, determined that this is the best adaptation of the Holmes-Rahe stress scale that I could find on the Internet.

http://www.helenjarvis-aromatherapy.co.uk/stresstest.html

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hundredpushups.com: week 3, day 2

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:05:41 -0700

20, 25, 15, 7, 11. Total of 78, about what I always get. So, while I'm moving forward in weeks, the last few reps are falling short to make up for the more difficult reps at the end.

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hundredpushups.com: week 3, day 1

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:35:52 -0700

17, 19, 15, 12, 14. Total of 9 short of the goal. And this is just Day 1 of the week. I'm curious how far other people have gotten in the challenge before hitting a crazy wall. Has anyone gotten to the end?

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Sunday Seattle Times article about McLeod

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:35:09 -0700

Article about McLeod

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html...

Awesome that Kellianne got to be on the front page. The photographer didn't even know she was my fiancee.

I have always believed that art and alcohol go well together. Glad we're getting some credit for the idea in Seattle now.

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identity vs preferences vs morality

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:39:59 -0700

There's a difference between saying:

I don't have much in common with the Olympics
I don't like the Olympics
The Olympics are bad

Just like there's a difference to these statements:

I don't have much in common with the Christians/Muslims
I don't like the Christians/Muslims
Christians/Muslims are bad

The first statement talks about what you identify with. What's within the sphere of your world. We operate almost entirely within the sphere of our own world, and within that sphere there's a whole other spectrum of taste, preference, and morality, but outside of the sphere of personal identity I think that the application of preferences and morality become very potentially ungrounded.

Because, it's not very easy to judge something that you don't identify with. Most likely, you also don't fully understand it, and are rarely as giving of the benefit of the doubt as you are when an object resides within your sphere of identity. Think of your friend circle. Most likely there's at least one person that you wouldn't necessarily like if you weren't so close to them. If there's not a friend like that, there's probably a family member. But because they're part of your circle, you're more likely to say, "but that's just who they are" and be sympathetic to them. But that same person may be totally misunderstood by someone who is not in their friend or family circle and be harshly judged.

I guess the question is, which judgment is more fair?

And, how static is the circle of identity? Can we (and should we) try to stretch it out to include more and more of the world? Like in a world war. We stretch our sphere of identity to include all nationalities on our side, or on the side we identify with. It's software in our head that is played with through creating sides, creating a sense of unity across extremely different people. Will globalization create a wider sphere of identity or will it fracture it? Will we all be able to feel like brothers because we all drive cars, drink Coke, and listen to U2? Probably not.

Meditation and personal will can probably stretch this out, but there are bound to be people who think that the sphere of identity is as big as it is for a reason. It's a sphere of trust. And you can't trust everyone. But then again, if that were the case, there are probably already people in the sphere that should not be there. And people outside of the sphere that should be there.

I'm just trying to be careful when I say "this is bad" and it also happens to be something that I can't identify with or that just isn't "me". 50% of the time I could be saying it just because I don't understand it. And rather than disliking it, trying to understand it might be a better strategy. There's a chance I may find something new of interest, and that's always good.

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my lost weekend

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:43:11 -0700

I have been obsessed... OBSESSED... with iPhone apps these last couple weeks. Part of it is because I haven't really dove into something new and interesting for a while, part of it because I think I was basically put on this planet to build iPhone apps in some weird conglomeration of my talents and interests, and part because I'm really busy with everything else going on in my life and like they say if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.

So, I'm getting married in less than 60 days. I'm going to Italy for 3 whole weeks after that. And stuff is happening with McLeod. And I spent a week in NYC. And it's summer. It's actually all a little crazy and sometimes I daydream about next January and its relative normalness. But I know I'll just jam pack it full of new craziness.

Kellianne's in Vegas this weekend with a few of her girlfriends doing what girls do in Vegas. Afternoon tea! I know it's all a front for some serious debauchery. And I'm retaliating by pretty much refusing to leave the house. Reading, napping, working on stuff, researching a few wedding things, etc. But I do have a bottle of wine in the fridge that will most likely not be in there much longer.

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Search for photos with up to 10 selected colors

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:42:34 -0700

Search for photos with up to 10 selected colors

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/

They extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using their visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.

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The Story of the Fail Whale - ReadWriteWeb

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:17:53 -0700

The Story of the Fail Whale - ReadWriteWeb

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/...

A really cute story.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb's top life tips

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:22:51 -0700

Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

From the end of this article, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom". Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of my heros. I've only read Fooled By Randomness, the book before Black Swan, but the ideas have been resonating with me for years. Basically, embrace randomness, accept big failure, focus on how you do things not necessarily whether they have immediate results. Living with good intentions is really about the only thing we can really control.

I also love his new emphasis on social interaction as the only primary filter on the world's information. Go to lots of parties and listen. Dress well for your own execution.

I was gonna include some more excerpts but there are too many good ones. Just read the whole thing.

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Air Me hopes and dreams

nobody@vox.com(Buster McLeod) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:14:36 -0700

Speaking of slicing life, part of the reason the 8:36pm project excites me right now is because new tools are becoming available that make slicing life a whole lot easier than it used to be. Twitter makes it easy to create a quick sentence about what you're doing. But I've always been more interested in the photo aspect of the project, about taking the picture that captures the moment. 30 years from now, the pictures are going to tell a better story about the life I was living than a sentence will.

So, obviously, having a camera phone and a way to send it directly to Flickr is really useful for this purpose. My original inspiration, Jamie Livingston's Photo of the Day project from 1979-1997, were Polaroids. That's obviously a lot more work to have to carry a Poloroid camera with you every day, and then carry the photos, sort them, and save them.

The new iPhone also has the ability to detect your location, and attach this information to the photos that you take. And, theoretically, Flickr could take this information and put the photo on a map. Unfortunately, the current implementation doesn't seem to do this, and I hear that it's because the iPhone's email application strips the data of photos out before it sends them. Why?

In any case, this is where Air Me (iTunes link) comes in. They seem to be on the same wavelength as me in regards to finding a way to transport as much data about the slice of life a photo captures as possible. Already, their app will attach your geo-location to the photo, and tag it with the city, state, and country you're in. Also, magically, it will tag the photo with the current temperature (73 degrees) and weather description (Mostly Sunny) of that city. Pretty awesome.

Only problem, at the moment, they don't allow you to specify a title for the photo in question before it automatically uploads. When I emailed support, Phil Easter, their CTO, responded within 5 minutes saying that they'd have these things fixed within the week. Also, they are planning on adding more automatic tagging options as well.

Here's my wishlist of features to make this work even better with my project (and I acknowledge that they might not all be features that are in the best interest of their product, but I think most of them are):

In addition to each kind of tag they automatically add to the photo, they should also add a corresponding machine tag, so that I can programatically extract the information from the photo as well. Basically, in addition to "Mostly Sunny" they should add "airme:weathername=Mostly Sunny". Flickr hides them, but gives access to them programatically so that it's easy to extract the data from the photo via their API.
A headline and link to the top news article on CNN or NY Times? I was planning on doing this myself for each day, finding the top news items of the day to go with the photo, but if they did it then I wouldn't have to!
Option to post the subject line of the photo to Twitter, along with a tinyurl link to the Flickr photo. I currently use Twittergram to do this, but they seem to be a little flaky with getting the Twitter posted with any expediency and consistency.
Option to add the photo to a photo set of my choosing. I'm currently manually adding them to my 8:36pm photo set, and they currently have an option to automatically create a set for the photos. They would just have to let me select the set rather than have it default to a "Seattle" set automatically.

I could come up with more, but these are the ones that are most important and exciting to me.

I'm looking forward to their next few releases, and have high hopes for using the new features for this project.

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